


pater omnipotens

by transgressive



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Gen, would it be uncouth to call this a daddy issues fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-06
Updated: 2016-03-06
Packaged: 2018-05-25 00:58:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6173761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transgressive/pseuds/transgressive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i> His mother never comes into the study. It is the only room in the entire house she refuses to clean, crouched on the floor with a brush and bucket, working until her palms are blistered. </i>
</p>
<p>A story about inheritance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pater omnipotens

**Author's Note:**

> “I had an inheritance from my father,  
> It was the moon and the sun.  
> And though I roam all over the world,  
> The spending of it’s never done.”  
> ― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

At the age of nine, Kaneki realizes that his bedroom sits across from a sanctuary.

The bookshelves in his father’s study cast long black shadows over the floor, cutting sharply across the length of the room. In the morning, the lines are thin like the edge of a razor. At dusk, they gently blur around the borders and become indistinct— like fresh ink bleeding over a sheet of stock paper, Kaneki thinks, or a plume of smoke rising on the horizon. It’s almost as if the shadows were melting into the floorboards.

When Kaneki sits in these shadows, a heavy book always spread out on his lap, he feels protected. It’s a strange sensation, unfamiliar, but not unwelcome. It gives him a sense of security. So long as those bookshelves continue to cast their shadows, nothing can hurt him. A protective spirit hangs over his head, watching over him with omnipotent eyes. Sheltering him from harm.

He wonders if this is what it means to have a father, this feeling of safety. It’s very nice.

Sometimes, he likes to imagine his father’s voice reading the books to him. There are pictures to remind him of his father’s face, but his voice is something Kaneki can only create in his imagination. In his mind, he constructs it as he thinks it should be: strong, calming, deep. Fatherly. A low, sweeping timbre guides him through each sentence, rising and falling with the rhythm of the story.

The voice never falters when it pronounces long, complicated words. It merely skips over them, smoothly, like a scratched disc. It is a confident voice. It carries him to many foreign lands and introduces him to many strange people. Vonnegut, Mishima, Tolstoy, Poe, Osamu, Kafka…

Today, they read Hemingway.

Kaneki isn’t particularly fond of Hemingway, but his dad liked him, and so Kaneki tolerates him. He plucks the book from the shelf with small, childish hands and drops himself squarely in the middle of the biggest shadow in the room. He reads the title first: _For Whom the Bell Tolls._

And then he opens the cover and gets to work.

The binding fits nicely in his palms as he turns the pages to the steady murmur of his father’s storytelling. It is hard to read the tiny black characters in the novels without sunlight, but he learns to adapt. He squints a lot. When his eyes get tired, he holds the book closer to his face. The neighbors look at his tired eyes sometimes and tease him: _one day you’ll be wearing glasses, just like your mother!_

And Kaneki smiles, because why wouldn’t he be happy to be compared to his kind-hearted, hardworking mother?

His mother never comes into the study. It is the only room in the entire house she refuses to clean, crouched on the floor with a brush and bucket, working until her palms are blistered. The floor in the room is covered in a thick layer of dust. The dust looks a lot like ashes, Kaneki thinks, only without any bones to be picked out.

Maybe that is why his mom never comes in this study. Maybe that is why she lingers at the doorframe, slippered toes tracing the edge of some imaginary boundary line, calling her son for dinner.

Yes, Kaneki feels very safe in this room.

\--

He is reborn at the age of twenty.

He is born with new eyes, new nails, a new reality. Most importantly, he is born with a new name. Haise Sasaki. Characters plucked at random from an overgrowth of dense, black paragraphs. Syllables that fall smoothly from his tongue, one after the next, like riverstones or the dark inkstrokes left behind by Arima’s fountain pen. Arima’s handwriting is marvelously smooth, Haise thinks.

Everything about Arima Kishou is smooth. He only looks angular from a distance. Up close, Haise sees him for what he really is: the slope of his nose, the arc of his eyelids, the gentle downward curve of his mouth when he thinks Haise isn’t looking. His hands are smooth, too, when they reach out to offer Haise a new novel. Today, perhaps as a stab at dark humor: _No Exit_ by Sartre.

(The unfortunate title was probably unintentional on Arima’s part. Arima can’t appreciate dark humor.)

“Thank you,” Haise says, absently stroking the cover. He means it. When Arima leaves, when Haise finds himself alone and isolated, books are his only salvation. His cell in Cochlea is uninhabited even by shadows; one can only withstand an endless white dessert for so long.

Arima nods in response, perhaps guessing at his train of thought. Arima’s color palette is a queer blend of white and gray: the flash of his eyeglasses in the fluorescents, the unblemished fabric of his coat, his neatly combed hair. But Arima’s white is different from Cochlea’s white. Cochlea’s white is barren and inhospitable. Arima’s white represents a new future, an uncharted expanse of possibilities— _tabula rasa_.

Arima gave Haise a second name, a second chance. Arima is like a father to Haise. That is to say, Haise _thinks_ Arima is like a father to him. He doesn’t have a lot of experience on the subject. But Arima’s hands look like a father’s hands, and Arima smiles at him sometimes with a paternal kind of fondness. And Haise feels safe when Arima is around— at least, he’s _pretty sure_ he feels safe.

Even though some days, sitting in his cell, he thinks of Arima’s face and immediately feels like his eyes are being stabbed, skewered, spiked, **impaled** with a white hot dagger, until the only thing in his vision is white— snow white, the color of a supernova, the death of a star, the birth of a black hole.

Even though Arima makes him feel sick to his stomach, sometimes. Even though Arima doesn’t tell him anything important. Even though Arima’s omnipotent eyes, the eyes of a death god, make him feel incredibly small, incredibly vulnerable. 

But none of that matters, really, because Arima comes to Haise every week with a new book and a fresh cup of coffee. And as Haise stares into his own reflection in the coffee’s dark surface, listening to the sweeping timbre of Arima’s voice as he introduces the new novel, he can pretend for the moment that nothing is wrong. That nothing can hurt him. That Arima is here to protect him, and that’s all there is to it.

(And later, much later, his coworkers will look at his tired eyes and observe: _one day you’ll be wearing glasses, just like Special Class Arima!_

And Haise will smile, because he can appreciate dark humor.)

**Author's Note:**

> EDIT: tfw you write a decent fic based on spoiler material and certain details don't line up with the released chapter :') if you notice any discrepancies, rest assured that they exist because i was HELLA impatient to publish this thing. my bad!


End file.
